Using these pages: some hints

Most of the pages of 'Wind in the Bush' are set out like reference books.
There is a contents list at the top of each page
and at least one index at the bottom of almost
all pages.
Use these to find the subject you want, or use CTRL F to find words or
phrases that interest you.
There is also a search box on the left.
All the main pages of 'Wind in the Bush' are listed at the top left of this
page and at the top of each of the states' pages.

Populations (2010), NSW, 7.2m; Vic, 5.5m;
Qld, 4.5m; WA, 2.3m; SA, 1.6m; Tas, 0.5m; Aust., 22m; Denmark, 5.5m;
Spain, 47m
Denmark and Spain are the nations with the
greatest installed
wind power per capita in the world, they are shown for comparison.
Since producing this graph I have heard that SA is now slightly behind
Denmark.

Operating Australian wind farms, average Megawatts generated
By states
(Only those farms listed by the AEMO)

As of the end of June 2012 – Total 641 MW
Some States' pages have pie diagrams showing individual wind farms

Components in a simplified wind turbine

Diagram credit US Congressional Research Service
The gearing, in particular, is simplified; typically the generator spins
about 90 times as fast as the rotor.

These pages discuss matters that relate to wind-generated
electricity on the utility scale as it is developing in Australia.
Utility turbines are usually a megawatt or more; I have not included
information on domestic wind turbines that typically generate no more than
a few kilowatts.

The World Wind Energy Association stated that at the end of 2013 the number
of small wind turbines world-wide reached around a million (more than half of
them in China), while at the same time the total capacity of large wind
turbines was 319GW.
The fact that
South Australia went from nothing in
early 2003 to around 33% wind power by 2014 while Australia as a whole
reached only about 4% wind power shows that
Australia could be doing a lot more than it is.

For information on specific Australian wind farms refer either to wind farm
pages on individual states (box above left) or the
Wind farm index.

I have aimed at facts;
facts that have been selected to inform open-minded people about wind farms,
but also facts that counter some of the
lies
perpetrated by wind farm opponents.
Some of the facts on these pages are not particularly palatable to wind farm
proponents, many will be highly unpalatable to wind farm opponents.

Greenhouse/climate change and
ocean acidification are looming
disasters whose massive proportions most people don't seem to grasp.
Both are largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
The only morally and environmentally acceptable alternatives to fossil fuel
energy are to severely cut back on energy use,
and this is highly unpalatable to almost everyone,
or to develop sustainable energy; and one of the most important and
technologically mature forms of sustainable energy is wind power.

In Australia's specific case, there is a huge amount of money in fossil fuels,
particularly coal.
The fossil fuel lobby has a strong hold over our 'democratic' government and
both major parties, but the Liberals in particular, seem to be 'under the
thumb' of the coal miners, and development of renewables is suffering
because of this.
Australia has the natural resources to be a world leader in wind and solar
power in particular, but in fact is trailing a long way behind countries like
Germany and Denmark.

Updates

Updates to these pages are added continuously and are extracted from the
various news media, scholarly journals, and by actively seeking information
from wind farm proposers/owners, governments, non-government organisations
and interested individuals.
I'd be pleased to receive comment from anyone who believes that any items
here are wrong, incomplete, or out of date (my email address is near the
top of each page).

Wind power potential

Australia has huge potential
for wind farm development, but if that
potential is to be developed governments must take a more pro-active part.
Apart from the artificially low
price of fossil-fuel-generated power, the greatest obstacle to the
development of wind power – and sustainable power in general –
is the lack of high capacity
electricity
transmission lines where they are needed; and governments
are showing little willingness to build them.
This might be compared with
Texas,
where the state government is building
transmission lines into areas with top-quality wind resources in
anticipation of wind farm development.

Where are we compared with the rest of the world?

The World Wind Energy Association (WWEA) report 2013 stated that the total
wind power was 319 gigawatts (GW.
Of that, 91 GW was in China, 61 WW in USA,
35 GW in Germany, 23 GW in Spain, 20 GW in India and
11 GW in the UK.
Wind power provided 4% of worldwide electricity demand.
(Also see How does Australia compare?.)

"In 2013, Australia's wind farms produced over a quarter of the country's
clean energy...
Wind power supplied 4 per cent of Australia's overall electricity during the
year.

Australia had 1639 wind turbines spread across 68 wind farms at the end of
2013 [a total of 3240MW] , as well as one small wind farm located in the
Australian Antarctic Territory.
Six new projects came online during 2013, including the Southern Hemisphere's
largest operational wind farm, at Macarthur in western Victoria [420MW]."

In 2014 the 270MW Snowtown 2 Wind Farm came on line in South Australia, making
Snowtown WF up to a total of 370MW, the second biggest in the country.

In Australia's wind power potential
I have calculated that if the best wind resources of Australia
were developed at least 90 GW of wind power is possible.
(This excludes areas of denser population, areas of tourism value,
conservation and other parks.)

The Howard Federal Government had a Mandatory Renewable Energy Target
(MRET)
which aimed at Australia having something under 2%
of its electricity generated by renewable means.
Scientists have warned that we must reduce world greenhouse gas production
rates by 60%.
The Rudd government promised
twenty percent renewable energy by 2020
in the 2007 election campaign.

Odd situation in early 2013

The Liberal Coalition has won elections in Victoria, NSW and Queensland.
They have made the obtaining of permission for building new wind farms in
those states difficult (see
elsewhere).
South Australia has about 40%
of Australia's wind power and has to
export substantial amounts of electricity to the eastern states when
local consumption is low and wind generation is high.

Three very big wind farms are either under construction, have been
approved or are seeking approval in South Australia: the
Ceres Project (seeking approval)
will generate up to 600MW,
Hornsdale (approved) will
generate up to about 300MW and
Snowtown Stage 2
(under construction) will generate up to 270MW; a total of 1170MW.
At the end of 2012 the total installed wind farm capacity in SA was about
1200MW, so these three projects, if built, will almost double that.
It seems to me that there will be insufficient capacity in the
interconnectors that transfer power between SA and the eastern states to
handle the wind farm generation in SA.

Speculation: threat to fossil fuel industry

Around 2005, when wind generated a negligible proportion of Australia's
electricity, the fossil fuel industry didn't see the wind industry as a
threat.
In 2012, with wind generating about a quarter of South Australia's
electricity and a steadily increasing percentage of electricity australia-wide,
the fossil fuel industry has realised that it has been caught with its
pants down and that the wind energy industry is a serious competitor.
It is reacting by trying, by any means available to it, to
discredit wind power and sustainable energy in general.
In this, through the pressure it is placing on politicians in the major
parties, and the
Liberal Party in particular, it
seems to be having quite a bit of success.

Coincidentally, just after I wrote the paragraph above, I read a
piece in The Guardian titled "Conservative
thinktanks step up attacks against Obama's clean energy strategy" which
discusses devious ways in which the fossil fuel industry is trying to
undermine the wind energy industry in the USA.

While Labor is not so pro fossil fuel as Liberal, it is still content to
leave the mining industry (a big part of which is coal) with some $4b of
subsidies annually.
For example, mining is exempt from the diesel excise, while the wind and
solar industries are not.

In 2006 the Royal Society, probably the most prestigeous, certainly the
most venerable, scientific society in the world,
wrote to ExxonMobil asking them to stop funding a dis-information
campaign on climate change.
If the fossil fuel industry funds climate change denial, why would they be
above funding a campaign against wind power?

Speculation: anti-wind power movement

In my experience wind farm proponents often avoid mentioning things that
are to the disadvantage of wind power, but rarely lie; wind farm opponents
commonly lie and are often woefully ill-informed.
Two examples:

Randall Bell, President of the
Australian Landscape Guardians,
a prominent anti-wind-power group, has said on national TV (ABC Four
Corners, 2011/07/25) that the battle against wind farms is a political
battle, not a scientific
argument, and that he will use any weapon he can to win that battle.
On the same program he said that "wind will never deliver on [the government's
20% of electricity by 2020 target], not in 100 million years".

Peter Richard Mitchell of the Technical and Economic Committee of the
Australian Landscape Guardians (and also a prominant member of the
Waubra Foundation), in his testimony to
the Senate Committee on Rural Wind Farms at Ballarat, spoke of "the multiple
and complete failure of wind power generation".

Yet, while the first wind farm in South Australia was built only in 2003,
just eight years later wind is providing
26% of the electricity generated in SA.
Over the same period total power generation and consumption in SA have
increased, the percentage of SA's power generated by coal has fallen from
42% to 25% and greenhouse gas production from the electrical generation
sector has decreased.
This is a remarkable achievement and there is no reason a similar feat could
not be managed in the whole of the country.

The anti-wind-power movement with their misinformation campaigns does
threaten the development of renewable energy in Australia.
While the NIMBY principle (not in my back yard) and envy of those who are
profiting from wind power are involved,
there are some people who honestly believe that their health may be adversely
affected by turbines and there are those who believe wind turbines are
spoiling the appearance of our hills.
Wind power does have problems, but they are often
exaggerated.

Emissions intensity (EI) from the four large states in the Australian
National Electricity Market (NEM) and the average for the whole of the NEM,
including Tasmania.
Tasmania's EI is off-scale at the bottom of this graph.
Graph credit – Professor Mike Sandiford, University of Melbourne;
data from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)

Note the very large decline in South Australia's EI; due almost entirely to
the introduction of wind power.

The most important point in favour of wind power is that the electricity
generated replaces power that would (especially in Australia) otherwise
be generated by burning fossil fuels.
So the bigger the proportion of wind power in our electricity supply the
greater the reduction in the production of the atmospheric greenhouse
gasses that cause
climate change and
ocean acidification.

A community where a wind farm is built is advantaged by:

Employment during construction and to a lesser extent operation.

Business for local contractors during construction; electrical,
transport, concreting, etc.

A boost to local businesses: hotels, motels and other accommodation
providers, cafes, restaurants, hardware shops, gift shops, etc.; again
especially during construction and to a lesser extent during operation.

The health improvements due to moving away
from polluting fossil fuels
can save more money than it costs to move to renewable energy.

Wind turbines are highly resistant to damage from natural disasters.

Their resistance to earthquakes and tsunamis was demonstrated by the
Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011/03/11; None of the 1746 utility-scale
wind turbines in Japan were damaged.

Flooding in Victoria put coal mines out of action in July
2012; wind farms, of course, were unaffected.

Hurricane Sandy, called a 'frankenstorm', caused huge damage in eastern
USA in October 2012; but very little damage to wind turbines was reported.

It reduces the exposure of the economy to fuel price volatility.

There is huge potential for wind farm development in Australia using
currently available technology.

Wind farms can be built with little environmental
damage and little loss of economically productive land.

Wind generated electricity, on a
level playing
field, is as cheap as most conventional forms of power generation
and cheaper than most of the other sustainable forms.

Wind power is a more mature technology than is solar.
The AEMO South Australia Supply and Demand Outlook report of 2011 showed
(Figure 3) that total installed wind capacity in SA is 15 times that of
solar.
(The difference in generated power would be even greater.)

Unlike 'clean coal' (coal with
sequestration), which may be achieved
at some time in the future at an unknown cost, wind farms are being built
now at a competitive cost.

The presence of wind turbines on ridges will reduce the number of
fires started by lightning
strikes by safely conducting the lightning to earth rather than it
starting bushfires.

One typical (2 MW) wind turbine in Australia can be expected to produce
over 6000 megawatt hours of electricity each year.
If this replaces coal-fired power, then the
CO2 released to the atmosphere will be reduced
by 6000 tonnes each year, if it replaces oil or gas-fired power,
CO2 released each year is reduced by about 3000 tonnes.

Mining, concentrating and refining the uranium used for
nuclear power
uses large quantities of fossil fuels; the 'fuel' for wind farms is
free and sustainable.
There is no waste from wind farming that is difficult to dispose of and
nothing that can be used for nefarious purposes.
The lead-time for building a nuclear power station is ten to fifteen years,
for a wind farm it is about three years.

Wind farms, once operating, produce negligible greenhouse gasses.
The greenhouse gasses produced in the construction of wind farms
are 'abated' within the first few months
of operation.
Coal-fired power stations are one of the largest producers of greenhouse
gasses on the planet; in terms of tonnes of CO2 per GWh of
electricity, oil fired power stations are less polluting than coal.
Gas-fired power too is less polluting than coal, but there is some
leakage of the very potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere from
the gas industry, and even without this, gas-fired power produces
about half the CO2/GWh of coal.

Wind farms use a negligible amount of water when operating, and very
moderate amounts
during construction.
By comparison, coal-fired power stations typically use more than a million
litres of water for each gigawatt-hour of electricity generated;
nuclear power stations and even many of the larger solar power stations
also require significant amounts of cooling water.
Wind turbines do not use water for cooling.

Compared to solar power wind farms use little land and a single
utility-scale wind turbine generates about 2000 times as much electricity
as a typical roof-top solar power installation
(see elsewhere).
(Solar and wind are compared
elsewhere
on this site.)

Once built wind turbines keep producing power without further costs
apart from general maintenance.
Should the economy of a country with a large wind energy resource collapse,
its wind turbines will go on generating power while it might not be able
to buy fuel for its more conventional power stations.

Turbines on the tops of ridges act like
lightning conductors and
safely conduct the energy of lightning strikes to earth; if the turbines
were not on the ridges the same lightning could cause fires.

Sinclair Knight Merz, an engineering and consulting firm with global
capacity, conducted a study into the benefits of wind power in Australia; it
was published in June 2012 and
can be read
or downloaded from the Clean Energy Council's Web site.

Average abatement achieved by 100 MW wind farm at
35% capacity factor in the National Electricity Market (NEM)

Region

Abatement intensity(t CO2e/MWh)

Emissions abated(t CO2e p.a.)

Equivalent cars removed from road

National Electricity Market (NSW, Qld, SA, Tas, Vic)

0.87

266 700

62 000

South West Interconnected System (WA)

0.76

233 000

54 200

Darwin Katherine Interconnected System (NT)

0.51

156 400

36 400

National

0.80

246 200

57 300

NSW

0.89

273 900

63 500

Qld

0.89

273 000

63 500

SA

1.02

314 100

73 100

Tas

0.45

137 200

31 900

Vic

1.10

337 300

78 400

't CO2e/MWh' is tonnes of carbon
dioxide from electricity, per Megawatt-hour

What the above figures tell us is that for every Megawatt-hour of electricity
that is generated by an Australian wind farm, on average, there is nearly a
tonne less greenhouse carbon dioxide released than there would be if the
wind farms were not there.
Coal-fired power stations (typical of Victoria) release about a tonne of
CO2 for every MWh they generate, other states have a lower
proportion of coal-fired power; Tasmania, in particular, has a high
percentage of clean hydro power.

There are a few wind farms where guided tours are offered; there are a few
wind farms that have viewing and information areas; there are a few wind
farms where events such as walks, runs and rides beneath the turbines are
organised periodically, but in general there is little for a tourist to do
at a wind farm.

More could be done to encourage tourism by the wind farm operators and if
more visits by the
general public were encouraged it would help to increase awareness of the
facts about wind power and dispell some of the myths about
noise and
health issues, etc.

The photo on the right is of a viewing pod on a wind turbine tower overlooking
Vancouver, Canada.
More can be read about this at
Inside Vancouver.
A similar viewing pod on one of the turbines at the proposed
Ceres Project on Yorke Peninsula
could provide oustanding views of the generally fairly flat Peninsula as
well as across the Gulf Saint Vincent to Adelaide.

Salmon Beach
(Esperance, WA): This was the first wind farm in Australia; now
decommissioned, but one turbine is still standing in its original position
and one has been moved into town; information at both.

Starfish Hill (SA):
Access to within a few metres from the foot of a turbine, a good view,
and some information.

Ten Mile Lagoon
(Esperance, WA): A side road from a very scenic coastal drive leads to an
information shelter on top of a hill with a good view.
Walking trails through native vegetation nearby.

Right back into pre-history wind has been used to move boats.
Wikipedia
says that the first practical windmills were in use in Sistan,
a region of Iran and bordering Afghanistan, at least by the 9th century.
Wind power began being harnessed in Europe in the twelfth century.
It was used to grind grain, power early industrial machines such as heavy
hammers, and to pump water.
With the coming of steam power in the nineteenth century, around the time
Australia was settled by Europeans, wind and water power went into decline;
steam power was more reliable and, very importantly, available on demand.

Recently climate change and the
'end of oil' have become important,
and mankind is having to 'kick the habit' of cheap energy.
It is not easy.

The largest turbines built in Australia – by date

The first public electricity supply (or utility-scale; not household or
farm supply) wind turbines in Australia were the 60 kW units built
at Salmon Beach, Esperance, Western Australia.
From that time wind
turbines have tended to become steadily larger, up to the present
(October 2012) when the most common size constructed is 3 MW.
Smaller turbines have also been constructed in particular cases and for
particular purposes.

The graph on the right shows some of the larger turbines built in Australia
in particular years.
Note that the size increase has tended to be exponential rather than linear,
with the turbines increasing in size by an average of about 20% each year.
The Australian record in the evolution of turbine sizes very much follows that
world-wide.
For several practical reasons it seems that wind turbines (or at least
on-shore wind turbines) cannot get
much bigger.

Unlike in the USA, where public electrical supply turbines were developed
much earlier, tubular steel, rather than steel lattice towers, have always
been used in Australia.
Elsewhere in the world some down-wind turbines (with the blades on the
down-wind side of the tower) have been built in the past; only the up-wind
type has ever been built in Australia.
All utility scale wind turbines in Australia are of the horizontal axis type.

The turbines listed in the table on the right (the same as those graphed
above) were among the largest constructed in Australia in the given years.

Size and cost of the cranes that are used for turbine erection.
Already crane hire fees (I've heard a figure of $30 000 per day) is a
major cost in wind farm construction and maintenance.
Off-shore turbines up to 6 MW have recently been built in Europe; it is
easier to move a huge floating crane from one turbine to another than a
similar crane on hill-tops.

Size and weight of components that must be transported by road.

Potential for aviation and radar interference.

Material fatigue issues.

Local opposition to siting (the bigger the turbines the more conspicuous
they are and the greater the area from which they can be seen).

A fuller comment on this topic is
elsewhere on this page.
Photos of some of these turbines are below; larger photos are generally
available via the links.

Turbine blade materials

So far as I know, up to 2011 most turbine blades were made of fibre-glass
reinforced epoxy, possibly with some balsa wood being incorporated; but in
late 2011 Nordex, at least, announced its first
carbon-fibre turbine blades.

In the table below wind farms completed in the same year are placed in
alphabetical order.
The exact date of completion is somewhat arbitrary.
Cumulative figures are rounded to the nearest MW.
Salmon Beach Wind Farm is not included in the cumulative figures because it
has been dismantled.

The following is copied from an information sheet published by Origin
Energy; it might be interesting to anyone who has been informed that there
is a proposed wind farm nearby.
This document goes some way toward explaining why there have been about
five wind farms proposed for every one built in Australia (as of early 2012).
I will quote the sheet verbatim...

Wind Farms
Guide to steps and timelines

Developing a wind farm is a careful and lengthy process.
Most wind farms take considerable time – around five years or even
longer – to proceed from concept through to approval, construction
and operation.
The following table indicates the steps which are followed, and a typical
wind farm timeline.

A decision to proceed (or not) is taken after each step; all times are
indicative only.

Step 1:(Year 1)

Initial research
Desktop research identifies windy areas with potentially suitable access,
environment and topography, and possible connection to the electricity
grid.

Decision point... seek landholder participation for
studies

Step 2:Year 1-2

Landholder contact, data collection and constraint mapping
Short-term agreements are sought with landholders to allow exclusive access
to properties for wind measurement (including wind monitoring towers),
initial environmental and constraint studies and other work, including
exploring options to connect to the electricity grid.
Landholder agreements may include long-term arrangements to be activated
should the project reach step 7 (construction).

Decision point... refine area and proceed to more detailed
studies

Step 3:Year 2-3

Refine project area, conduct detailed studies and develop layout
The project area is refined and more detailed environmental, landscape, noise
and other assessment studies are conducted.
These inform the development of draft management and construction plans and,
with landholder and community input, help pinpoint potential locations for
turbines, access tracks, any required substations, connection lines, and
other project layout details.

Decision point... proceed to development application

Step 4:(Year 3)

Development Application process
Detailed development application documents are produced for consideration by
the community and the appropriate planning authorities (local, state,
federal) in the statutory development assessment process.
The development assessment process provides everyone with the opportunity to
make formal submissions regarding the final proposal, prior to it being
assessed.
This assessment process may see the proposal approved without conditions,
approved with conditions, or refused.

Decision point... outcome of development application
process considered

Step 5:(Year 3-4)

Tenders and final agreement for grid connection
If development approval is given and any conditions accepted, agreement is
reached with the electricity network for future grid connection and tenders
are sought for equipment and the construction process.

Step 6:(Year 4)

Financial Investment Decision
Following approvals and tenders, the Origin Board of Directors then
considers whether to commit expenditure for the construction and operation
of the wind farm (this decision will normally involve hundreds of millions of
dollars).
The decision may be to proceed or to wait, pending various business or
economic issues.

Decision point... financial decision to construct or not

Step 7:(Year 4-5)

Construction
If the financial decision is to proceed, orders are placed for turbines and
other equipment, and a construction company engaged to build the wind farm.
Long-term lease agreements with landholders are activated during this stage
and a Community Fund established.

Step 8:(Year 5)

Generation
The wind farm begins generating electricity for the national grid.

Climate change
is happening and must be minimised;
Australia and the world must move away from fossil fuels.
No reasonable and informed person can doubt this any more.
Australia now has a government that recognises the need for
action, but is doing too little too leisurely.
Australian governments could do
much more
and there are many possible actions that would
have very little cost to taxpayers or industry.

Wind, at the present, is the leading economically competitive
form of sustainable energy, but solar photovoltaic is catching up
and solar thermal is showing promise.
(Australia's wind power potential is dealt with on
another page on this site.)

Using biological waste and methane from land-fill to generate electricity
is feasible and is being done, but its capacity is limited.
It is looking
like solar thermal is close to being
competitive, but it will take many years to
'scale-up' to the point where they are major sources of energy.
'Hot dry rock' geothermal seems to have too many technical difficulties to
be a serious contender in the foreseeable future.
Photovoltaic solar is growing quickly, but is a long way behind
wind in capacity at the present.
Wave-power, harnessing algae to produce
fuels, and other alternatives seem further away.
A decade or two could change that picture.

In mid 2012 the limits to the growth of the wind industry in Australia
were:

The lack of electricity
transmission
lines where they are needed
(Governments seem willing to build transmission lines to new mines, but
unwilling to build them for the large-scale development of wind farms);

The relatively low wholesale price of power from hydro and of
renewable energy certificates created by solar installations makes power
retailers relucent to offer power purchase agreements to new wind farms;

A growing level of opposition to the building of wind farms, which seems
based mainly on questionable claims that
wind turbines cause ill-health, and the NIMBY principle;

Federal government is not as supportive as it could well be.

(The low wholesale price of hydro is probably related to 2010 and 2011 being
unusually wet; leading to an abundance of water for hydro-power.)

Certainly wind power is not 'the answer' to climate change.
Only a naïve person would believe that there is a single answer, and only
a naïve or dishonest person would object to wind power because it is not
'the answer'.
It is a part of 'the answer'.
Other parts are energy conservation, technological innovation, development of
other forms of sustainable energy, and education.
(I have listed some suggestions in
What should be done.)

This is also an option.
Turbines can either be set in the seabed in shallow water or they can
float and be tethered to the seabed in deep water.
Off-shore developments could at least double Australia's wind power
potential.
The greatest Australian potential for off-shore wind power is near Tasmania,
but all the southern coast of Australia could be used.
Unfortunately both the capital cost and operational and management costs
of off-shore wind power is about twice that of on-shore.
The former is due to the considerable costs of foundations, submarine
transmission cables and installation facilities, while the latter reflects
the remote and harsh sea environment in which they operate.
(Also see Australia's wind power
potential.)

If the logic in the few sentences above is correct, then wind power must be
developed to the maximum reasonable degree and as quickly as possible.

In Australia's wind power potential
I argue that the potential installed wind power in Australia
is more than 91 GW,
and the amount of generation then would be more than
241 TWh p.a.
(Total electrical generation in Australia in 2010 was around 300 TWh.)

Some of us will get sick of the site of wind turbines; some already are.
(I love the things; they are elegant, graceful, and do no harm to most views.
Of course there are some places where I would not want to see them built.)
The alternatives to building wind turbines are to either
throw caution and sanity to the wind and continue with fossil
fuels, or to totally change our life-styles and enormously cut down on the
amount of energy that we use, in our personal lives and in industry.
We may well do the former,
I cannot imagine our society being ready or willing to do the latter.

The figures in the table below were recorded from the AusWEA site
in July 2003, February 2004, June 2005, and December 2006.
Later figures were from my own records.

South Australia has been the leading wind power state in Australia since
construction of Canunda and Lake Bonney Stage 1 wind farms in March 2005,
and since
late 2005 (following completion of Wattle Point, Cathedral Rocks and Mount
Millar) has hosted about half of Australia's wind power.

It is worth noting that for every wind farm that has been built (about 45 in
mid 2011), another four or five (over 200) have been proposed.
Would most of these proposed wind farms have been built if conditions
were more favourable to sustainable energy development?

Note that
installed capacities are a very long way from what
they could be.
The shortfall is mainly due to lack of government – both state and
federal – support for renewable energy; for example the failure to
build the needed new
transmission
lines.

These pages deal with industrial-scale wind turbines only.
Dept. Environment, Water,
Heritage and the Arts data (2009/02/20) recorded about 50 Australian
'wind farms' of less than 160 kW each, totalling 1.48 MW installed
capacity, and not included here.

All the figures given in the table below are what the wind farms can produce
in ideal wind conditions and are known as 'installed capacities'.
Actual generation is less, and the difference is defined as the
capacity factor.

Total installed wind power
All figures are megawatts (MW); totals are for the end of each year

State/Year

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

NSW

17

17

17

17

17

17

187

187

187

276

276

276

276

Qld.

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

12

SA

0

35

35

388

388

388

742

909

1020

1073

1073

1205

1475

Tas.

0

0

0

0

0

140

140

140

140

140

140

308

308

Vic.

39

92

92

104

104

104

104

428

428

434

514

939

1066

WA

24

27

27

29

200

201

202

202

202

411

425

481

481

AustraliaTotal

92

183

183

549

720

861

1217

1879

1990

2476

2569

3049

3618

Assuming a capacity factor of 34%, 3049 MW of wind turbines will
generate about 9080 GWh per year

World – top curve
Australia – lower curve
The World data came from The
Guardian – updated 2013/02/14

The figures for installed wind power after 2006 on the table above, are
from my own calculation and estimation;
I didn't calculate the figures for proposed capacity because
I have come to suspect that some of the proposals are made for dubious
reasons and not with a serious belief that the particular farm will ever
be built.

The daily minimum electrical consumption rate in SA at 2008 is around
1000 MW.
If SA wind farm generation was to grow much greater than this then substantial
amounts of electricity would have to be sent to other states, at least a part
of the time; or other uses for the electricity would have to be found, for
example,
desalination of sea water and the recharging of electric cars.
Exporting substantially more power would require the construction of more
interstate power transmission lines (interconnectors).

The World Wind Energy Association reported 2013/10/18 that there was 14GW
of wind power installed in the first half of 2013 bringing the total to
296GW.
The total at the end of 2013 was 319GW.

The graph on the right shows the figures for installed wind power in the
world (top pink line – from World Wind Energy Reports) and in
Australia (lower blue line).
Growth in world installed capacity since 1996 has been around 27% per year.
Annual growth in Australian installed capacity was around 80% from 1996 to
2006, but has slowed to about 23% in more recent years.

Navigant Research reported in March 2013 that 2012 was a record year for
wind farm installation, 45GW, world-wide; bringing the total to 285GW.
The report stated that wind was generating 2.62% of the world's electricity
at the end of 2012.

Installed wind power in Australia, by wind farm and as of January 2013

Wind farm

State

MW

Albany

WA

35.4

Blayney

NSW

9.9

Bremer Bay

WA

0.6

Bungendore

NSW

140.7

Canunda

SA

46.0

Cathedral Rocks

SA

66.0

Challicum Hills

Vic.

52.5

Clements Gap

SA

56.7

Codrington

Vic.

18.2

Collgar

WA

206.5

Coral Bay

WA

0.83

Crookwell

NSW

4.8

Cullerin Range

NSW

30.0

Denham

WA

0.7

Wind farm

State

MW

Emu Downs

WA

79.2

Esperance group

WA

5.6

Gunning

NSW

46.5

Hallett group

SA

350.7

Hampton Park

NSW

1.3

Hopetoun

WA

0.6

Kalbarri

WA

1.7

Kooragang

NSW

0.6

Lake Bonney group

SA

278.5

Leonards Hill

Vic.

4.1

Morton's Lane

Vic.

19.5

Mount Millar

SA

70.0

Oaklands Hill

Vic.

67.2

Portland group

Vic.

132.0

Wind farm

State

MW

Rottnest

WA

0.6

Snowtown

SA

100.8

Starfish Hill

SA

34.5

Thursday Island

Qld

0.5

Toora

Vic.

21.0

Walkaway

WA

90.2

Waterloo

SA

111.0

Wattle Point

SA

90.8

Waubra

Vic.

192.0

Windy Hill

Qld

12.0

Wonthaggi

Vic.

12.0

Woodlawn

NSW

42.0

Woolnorth group

Tas.

139.8

These wind farms are parts of larger units
(the groups on the left two tables).

The March 2012 starting date of five of the Victorian wind farms was a,
probably unintended, consequence of the
new wind farm laws.
The developers had to either start by mid March or re-apply for approval
under the new laws that were intended to make wind farm development
very difficult (a part of the
Liberal's war on
renewable energy).

A consequence of the forced construction of this group of new wind farms
will probably be to reduce the price of Renewable Energy Certificates and so
delay construction of wind farms in other Australian states.

The biggest wind farms in Australia are Macarthur, the Hallett group and
Lake Bonney.

The Macarthur
Wind Farm (420 MW) in Victoria is as of December 2012 the
biggest in Australia.

The
Hallett wind farms of SA
could easily be called a single wind farm; all are within a fairly small
area and all feed power into a single substation.
Brown Hill Range (Hallett #1, 95 MW), Hallett Hill
(Hallett #2, 69.3 MW), North Brown Hill (Hallett #4, 132.3 MW)
and Bluff Range Wind Farm (Hallett #5, 52.5 MW)
are all operating (total 351 MW, graph at right)
and construction of Mount Bryan (Hallett #3) at 63 MW is 'under contract'.
When and if all are built the total for Hallett will be about 414 MW.

When Snowtown stage 2
Wind Farm is finished it will bring the total installed power of the
Snowtown wind farms to 371 MW, making it the biggest in SA at least
until Hallett #3 is built.

Wind farm generation data

Generation data from all of the Australian wind farms connected to the
two (WA and eastern Australian) power grids should be freely available in
useful formats (eg. daily, weekly, monthly, annually) to the general public.
They are not.

Limited generation data from WA

Wind generation data from WA's wind farms is not made
public except in a limited way from the WA
Independent Market Operator.
I would think that the Western Australian public has a right to know, in
much more detail, how much power wind farms generate, after all, they are
paying for the wind farms with their power bills.

The lack of readily available generation data from wind farms allows
opponents
of wind power to falsely claim that wind farms actually generate very
little electricity.
This situation changed to a limited extent when the Australian Energy Market
Operator (AEMO) made
data available from all of the larger Eastern Australian wind farms.
Unfortunately, the data are provided in a format that is quite useless
to the general public.

The figures below were calculated from AEMO data downloaded via the
Wind Farm Performance
Net site.
Andrew Miskelly, who, it seems, runs that site at his own expense and in his
own time, recomputes the data from the AEMO and converts it
into more useful daily generation graphs.
Andrew used to also provide a facility for downloading monthly generation
totals for all the larger Australian wind farms; but for some reason stopped
this.

Graphs of average power generation, on a month-by-month basis, (up to the
time Andrew stopped his service) for each of
the wind farms in the table below are given on the state wind farm pages
of Wind in the Bush.
This can be reached via the menu at the top of this page
or the Wind farm index.

The capacity factors
and average power outputs were calculated for data
recorded in the given periods (inclusive of the starting and ending months).
Internationally, I believe, a capacity factor of anything above 30% is
considered very good for an on-shore wind farm.

As a resident of Mid-North SA I am pleased to see that Hallett and
Snowtown wind farms have the highest capacity factors of the big farms
and that the
Hallett group is now generating
almost twice as much electricity as any
other wind farm in Australia (and probably the Southern Hemisphere).
Waubra and Woolnorth are the only big wind farms not in Mid-North SA to come
close to the capacity factors of Hallett and Snowtown.

The capacity factor of any power station is a measure of how much electricity
it actually produces compared to its potential, if it was running at full load
100% of the time.

Data that enable the calculation of the capacity factor of many of
eastern Australia's wind farms have become available from the
AEMO and are tabled and graphed elsewhere
on this page.
The Net site of the
Australian Landscape
Guardians (ALG) provide downloadable monthly wind farm generation data
in 'csv' form
(suitable for spreadsheets) from which capacity factors can be calculated.
(On the same site Andrew Miskelly provides daily wind farm output in a
graphical format.)

I don't know of anywhere that wind farm generation figures are available for
Western Australia (and I'd be please if anyone could tell me if they are
available somewhere).

Actual capacity factors achieved in eastern Australian wind farms vary from
23% up to 42% and
average about 35% (based on data from the AEMO via
the ALG Net site as of March 2011).

Capacity factors for South Australia's fossil fuel power stations;
for comparison

Graph from 2013 South Australian Electricity Report by the Australian
Energy Market Operator.

Note that the capacity factor of coal-fired Playford B power station has
declined to zero (it has been 'put into mothballs').
Also note the decline in the capacity factor of the coal-fired Northern Power
Station, the second biggest power station and the only remaining coal-fired
one in SA; which is expected to only be used for the warmer half of each year
before being shut down all together.
This has been possible due to SA's wind farms.

Capacity factors and
power generated
are graphed below.
Graphs for individual farms are provided on the states pages.
All generation data start from the beginning of the month shown and are up
to the end of 2012.

Macarthur Wind Farm generates
more power than any other since it came on line in December 2012, but I do
not have the figures for it.
The data for this graph are the same as those used in
the table above,
except that only the totals for Hallett and Lake Bonney are included here.

Does the average generation (or capacity factor) of a wind
farm increase or decrease as it ages?

Comment by Karina Lindvig of the European Wind Energy Association

"The Danish Wind Turbines Owners Association did an analysis which shows
that there is no decrease in production over time.
The production fluctuates over the years – obviously as there will be
more wind in some years than in others.
However, when you correct in relation to the given wind year the production
is stable."

A document written by Gordon Hughs and published by the
Renewable Energy Foundation claimed to show that the
load factor
(effectively the same as the capacity factor) of wind farms in the UK and
Denmark decline greatly with the age of the wind farms (up to 15 years).
For example Hughs claimed that the load factor of UK onshore wind farms
declined from 24% at age 1 year to 15% at age 10 and 11% at age 15.

What is the story for Australia?

Based on 3240 turbine-years of data from the wind farms having at least two
years of operation in the Australian eastern states grid it can be said
that there is a variety of figures, with some slight decreases and more
slight, or substantial, increases in output.
(The data were obtained from the Australian Energy Market Operator.)
The average change in generation was an increase of about 0.58MW for each year
of operation of each wind farm.

Of 21 wind farms, seven showed a slight decline in generation with time and
the remaining 14 showed a slight or substantial increase.
Those that showed the greatest increases were
Lake Bonney Stage 2,
4.0MW each year;
Waterloo, 3.9MW each year; and
Waubra, 2.3MW each year.

Australia's wind farms run at a
weighted average capacity factor of about
35%; it is doubtful that the capacity/load factor of UK wind farms was
ever as low even as the 24% claimed by Hughs; 15% and 11% are beyond
belief.

I can only speculate that the likely causes of the general increase is
an increase in the expertise of the operators and fine tuning of the
turbines with time.

It seems quite increadible that the wind farms in Australia could be
performing so well with time while European wind farms performed as poorly
as claimed by Hughs.
I suggest that Hughs' document is no more than another of the
lies attempting to discredit wind power and
probably funded by the fossil fuel industry.

Australia has been slow to move into sustainable energy in general and
wind power in particular.

Germany has one twenty-first the land area of Australia, yet has about
14 times as much wind power (and hugely more solar power).
Spain has about twice the population of Australia, a fifteenth the
land area, yet about 11 times as much wind power.
Little Denmark, with a quarter our population and 0.6% of our land area
has about twice our wind power (Denmark has a higher percentage of
wind power than any other country).
Even the USA, a nation whose federal administration has, until the recent past,
been notoriously against doing anything about greenhouse/climate change,
has about 21 times as much wind power as Australia.

Australia had about 2.5GW of installed wind power at the end of 2011; in
just that year China installed 16 to 18GW; seven times the total in
Australia.

It is interesting to look at wind power in terms of megawatts per billion
dollars of gross domestic product (forth column and ranking in fifth
column).
In this Demark is ahead of Australia by a factor of eight, Portugal ahead
by a factor of seven, and Australia comes 21st (fifth column) in the
world.
Every nation on the table other than Japan is ahead of Australia in
MW/$b GDP.
New Zealand (not on the table), with 4224 MW/$b GDP, ranks eighth
in the world and even countries like Greece, Bulgaria, Costa Rica and
India are ahead of Australia.
China has twice the investment in wind power per dollar GDP that Australia
has.
It is interesting that China installed 8 GW of wind power in
the first half of 2011 alone – almost four times the total installed
wind power in Australia in just six months!

The sixth column shows Watts of installed wind power per capita in the
listed countries, with the world ranking shown in the seventh column.
In this too, Australia comes a poor 16th.

Australia has huge potential for developing wind power, but has been
notably slow in doing so.

The proportion of electricity that can be generated by wind before problems
relating to variability of supply become intolerable has been debated
for years.
The magazine Wind Power Monthly reported that Denmark generated 31.5% of
its power by wind in January 2008 (apparently January is its windiest month)
and had generated even more in January 2007 (35.5%).
Even more important, the article stated that there had been no need to
constrain production from the turbines at any time.
(I believe that Denmark has the advantage of power-sharing with nearby
Norway which has a large hydro-power resource.)

The southern hemisphere

I believe that Brazil has the greatest wind energy industry after Australia,
reaching 1 GW installed capacity around July 2011.
(Reported by Renewable
Energy Magazine).
Wikipedia stated that New Zealand had 615 MW installed capacity in
June 2011.

Australia's target of 20% renewable power by the year 2020

Kevin Rudd promised a mandatory renewable energy target
(MRET) of 20% by
2020 before the November 2007 election, as of December 2009 there is little
indication that sufficient renewable energy will be in place in time to
reach the target.

Old sustainable energy

In the year to 2011/09/30 about 19 685 GWh of hydro-electricity
was generated in Australia; this was up from previous years because of
higher rainfalls (Clean Energy Council 2011 report).
The Snowy Mountain Authority (SMA) and Hydro Tasmania (HT)
generate about 15 TWh per year.
Installed capacity of all other hydro-generators in Australia is about one
third of that owned by SMA and HT,
(DEWHA figures)
so it is reasonable to assume that
generation from them would be about 5 TWh/yr; giving a total for Australian
hydro-power generation of about 20 TWh/yr.
(This may be declining because of climate change, reducing rainfall, and
hence less run-off and less water to run through turbines.)

The Rudd Government's stated target of 20% renewable energy by 2020
involved adding 20% new renewable energy above the baseline at the time the
MRET was promised.
If Australia is to reach the
target then we will require about
42 TWh/yr of new
renewable energy and a total of 62 TWh/yr of renewable generation by 2020.

Little new hydro capacity is being built, so we can figure on hydro making
up no more than 20 TWh (see the box on the right)
of the 62 TWh/yr required by 2020.
This leaves a deficit of 42 TWh to be generated by technologies
other than hydro.

Installed wind power in Australia in April 2011 was 2.01 GW.
I have not been able to obtain any figures for actual wind power generation
for the whole of Australia, but using a capacity factor of 34% we can
calculate about 6.0 TWh per year from the installed capacity.

It seems unlikely that forms of sustainable energy other than hydro and
wind can make up more than 5 TWh/yr by 2020, see
Sustainable Energy – Overview.
Wind currently makes up just over 90% of new renewable energy, so it seems
that if we are to reach the target, wind power will have to fill most of
the gap.
So, if we are to have 62 TWh/yr of renewable energy by 2020
it is likely to be made up of about 20 TWh (old) hydro, wind at least
37 TWh, and other probably less than 5 TWh (20+37+5=62).

In Australia's wind power potential
I argue that the potential installed wind power in Australia
is more than 91 GW, and the amount of generation then would be more than
241 TWh p.a.

Australia's wind power will need to be increased from 6 TWh to
37 TWh if we are to reach the 20% renewable energy by 2020 target.
To generate 37 TWh per year a total of about 12.5 GW installed
wind power is needed; we now (April 2011) have 2 GW install wind power,
we need another 10.5 GW to get to 12.5 GW; there are nine years
to 2020, so about 1170 MW will have to be installed each year,
or more than one 3 MW turbine installed every day.

In April 2011 there were nine wind farms under construction in Australia.
It takes about eighteen months to build a wind farm and there were 413
wind turbines (with an average capacity of 2.3 MW each)
in the farms under construction;
so this equals a construction rate of three turbines every four days,
well short of what is needed (although the rate has picked up substantially
from a year or so earlier).
Putting the figures in MW, we need 3.2 MW of turbines constructed each day,
and the present rate of construction is 1.7 MW/day.

Year

GWh

Year

GWh

2011

10 500

2016

22 500

2012

12 500

2017

27 000

2013

14 000

2018

32 000

2014

16 500

2019

36 500

2015

17 500

2020

41 000

The approximate legislated annual renewable energy targets are shown in the
table on the left.
So most of the work needs to be done in the last five of the twenty year
period.
As of October 2011 it is looking like a Liberal Party dominated federal
government will be back in power in the next few years and that they will
not be wanting to take any serious actions to slow climate change.
My opinion, based on evidence given in
another page on this site
is that a Liberal government will cancel the 20% by 2020 renewable energy
target soon after they get into power.

The Australian Government offers substantial subsidies for the installation
of solar photovoltaic panels on homes and small businesses anywhere in
Australia.
However, if you want to install a small wind generator and you are
connected to the electrical grid you get nothing.

This produces an unfair discrimination against the small-scale wind
industry.
Why would you pay full price for a small wind turbine when you can get
thousands of dollars from the government to install solar?

In April 2005 I visited the then new
Wattle Point
Wind Farm on the Yorke Peninsula of South Australia
and was struck by the thought that, in some ways, wind turbines
are to conventional power stations what sailing ships are to motor vessels.
Motor vessels and sailing ships both have been
used to move people and freight from one place to another, conventional
power stations and wind turbines both generate electricity.

Both sailing ships and wind turbines are graceful and are works of art,
while motor vessels and fossil fuel power stations are simply practical and
are means-to-an-end.

Both sailing ships and wind turbines are sustainable; motor vessels and
conventional power stations are not, because of the finite reserves of
fossil fuels they burn and the damaging carbon dioxide and other pollutants
they dump into the atmosphere.

To anyone who says that a wind turbine is not a work of art I would say
go and stand in the middle of a modern wind farm and watch while the sun
sets. If you go with an open mind you cannot help seeing their beauty
and grace: quietly powering our energy-hungry life styles while doing
very little harm to the environment.
I don't mind admitting that they fascinate me.

Ironically, motor vessels replaced sailing ships, yet wind turbines are,
to some extent, replacing fossil fuel fired power stations. With
greenhouse and the approaching end of oil, will we one day see the
return of sail?

Fossil fuelled electricity generation is currently cheaper than wind
generated electricity, because the fossil fuel industry is
subsidised
and environmental pollution costs are not paid by the fossil fuel industry.

Economists and politicians often make statements such as "Non
fossil fuel methods of power generation cannot yet compete
financially on a level playing field with fossil fuel fired
power stations".

There is no level playing field!
Fossil fuel power stations release their damaging carbon dioxide emissions
into the atmosphere at no cost to their operators, while the cost to the
planet will be huge.
If the fossil fuelled power generators were forced to dispose of
their emissions responsibly then the playing field would
become level; and they would not be able to compete with some
of the more advanced environmentally friendly alternatives.
(Also see
Fossil fuel electricity in perspective.)

The Australia Institute produced a
report titled "The nature and extent of Federal Government subsidies to
the mining industry" dated April 2012 and authored by Matt Grundoff.
The report stated that the Federal Government alone provides $4 billion
annually to the mining industry in subsidies and concessions; this does not
include the cost of providing the mining industry with infrastructure, nor
State Government susidies.

It is difficult to imagine any cheaper way of getting energy than by digging
coal out of the ground, moving it a couple of kilometres, and burning it in
a power station. It is as cheap as it is irresponsible, polluting, and
unsustainable.

Geosequestration is
one way that the fossil fuel industry is hoping to dispose of its
carbon dioxide (the Government is subsidising research for them).

The graph on the right compares the costs of various forms of
electricity, including the estimated cost of 'responsibly'
generated coal-fired power (third from the left). No-one has yet
proven this form of generation in practice.

The $64/MWh for coal-fired power with geosequestration on the
graph is probably a minimum. Other researchers calculate
between Aust$74 and $130; see the
cost of geosequestration on my Greenhouse page.

Interestingly, a Queensland government site
(http://www.energy.qld.gov.au/infosite/electricity_generation.html, no
longer available),
gave the cost of nuclear generated electricity as $190-$250/MWh.

It is almost a tradition for wind farm developers, when announcing
a new wind farm, to state how many homes it could supply.
I haven't used this on my pages, believing it to be vague and of
little value.
There is a huge variation in the amount of power used by various households,
and since wind farms do not generate power continually they cannot supply
all the power needed by a single house, let alone several thousand houses.

How many homes do various companies equate to one installed MW of wind
farm?

Company

No. homes per MW

Wind farm

AGL

570

Brown Hill Range (Hallett)

Acciona

740

Waubra (Ballarat)

Epuron

400

Silverton (Broken Hill)

Repower

700

Ceres Project (Yorke Peninsula)

Pacific Hydro

500

Challicum Hills (Ararat)

Roaring 40s

500

Woolnorth (NW Tasmania)

Verve

700

Albany

WestWind

571

Lal Lal (Ballarat again)

Why the variation?
Perhaps it is due to the perceived quality of the local wind resource,
perhaps it depends on how much power households use in different regions,
perhaps it is only due to variations in the estimations of
company public relations people?

The numbers above vary from 400 to 740 homes per installed megawatt.
If we assume a 35% capacity factor we can calculate that an installed
megawatt will generate 350 kW on average.
If 350 kW will supply 400 homes (at Broken Hill) then the assumption is
875 Watts per home; if it will supply 740 homes (at Ballarat) then the
assumption is 470 Watts per home.

The first wind farm in Australia was
Salmon Beach, which was
commissioned in March 1987 at Esperance.
It consisted of six 60 kW turbines.

As of September 2010 the largest wind turbines in Australia were the 3 MW
(3000 kW) units in use at
Lake Bonney
and Waterloo wind farms.
These have steel towers about 80m high and fibre glass blades about 44m long.

The technical challenges of lifting loads of nearly 100 tonnes
(the Nacelle, including gearbox,
dynamo, cooling system, etc.) to heights of around 80m are considerable.

In some European off-shore wind farms, turbines of 6 MW are now being used.
They have blades of up to about 65m long (the wingspan of a Boeing
747-400 aircraft is 64.67m – that's the length from wingtip to wingtip).
When assembling these turbines, instead of raising the whole of the nacelle
and its contents in one lift,
as has generally been done in Australian wind farms, I believe that
the main components of the nacelle are raised in separate lifts.

One limit to the size of a wind turbine seems to be in the size and
perhaps more importantly, the cost, of the crane needed and the difficulty
of lifting very heavy loads to great heights.

Image credit: Meta-analysis of net energy return for wind
power systems (2010, Elsevier, Renewable Energy); Ida Kubiszewski,
Cutler J. Cleveland, Peter K. Endres
EROI for power generation systems.
Nuclear (2) omits the extreme outliers from the group of Nuclear (1), and
thus represents a better assessment of what the EROI for nuclear is
likely to be.
See the original paper for more information.

EROI is an important concept in the energy industry.
It is defined as the ratio between the useful energy got out of a process
against the energy needed for that process; in simple terms, energy out
against energy in.
As an example, petroleum in the past has typically had an EROI ratio of around
30:1, that is, thirty units of energy obtained from the oil or gas for
each unit of energy consumed in finding, pumping and refining the oil or
gas.
(The EROI is often written as a simple number, ie. 30 rather than 30:1.)

Importantly the EROI for petroleum is declining as more wells have to be
drilled, more pumping done, more high-tech processes used, to obtain the
same amount of oil.

It has been suggested that if EROI for our most important energy sources
gets down to 10:1 it will begin to have a heavy impact on the modern way
of life.

Studies on EROI for many of the energy industries have been reported on
The Oil Drum and in particular
Dr. Cutler Cleveland and Ida Kubiszewski posted an article describing a
meta-analysis on the
EROI
of wind power on The Oil Drum.

From Cleveland and Kubiszewski's data the following can be extracted;

Energy return on investment for wind power

Country

Number ofvalues recordedin each country

Average EROI

Belgium

2

29

Denmark

12

28

Germany

28

17

Japan

9

10

Switzerland

2

4

USA

4

20

Overall average

18

It should be noted that there is a huge range of EROI values, indicating
that the industry is not mature.
As the industry matures businesses will learn to develop wind power in
areas and using methods that maximise the EROI value.

Cleveland and Kubiszewski calculated an overall average EROI of 18.1, placing
"wind energy in a favourable position relative to conventional power
generation".

Unfortunately, Cleveland and Kubiszewski's data did not include any information
on Australian wind farms.
ESIPC (SA Electricity Supply Industry Planning Council) does not record
EROI figures for South Australian wind farms.

Kurt Cobb has posted on EROI in the
Energy Bulletin.
Some of his figures for energy sources other than wind are in the table
below (I added wind):

Energy return on investment

Energy source

EROI or Range

Comment

Wind

Around 18

See above

Crude oil

Around 20

Conventional

Tar sands

1 to 7

Figures vary greatly

Coal

80

but falling

Nuclear

2 to 11

Figures vary greatly

Solar

?

Figures vary greatly

Hydro-electric

very high

EROI x Scale for fossil and renewable energy sources

EROI against total energy

The figure on the right gives a different perspective on the EROI
picture.

The original of the figure was posted on the
Oil Drum.
It relates primarily to US data.

The distance the balloons are from the bottom shows increasing energy
return on energy invested.
The distance from the left shows increasing power obtained from that
source.

If Australia is to reach PM Rudd's stated
target of 20% renewable energy
by 2020 then wind energy will become a large component of the electricity
supply and the forecasting of wind velocities should be, and is being,
improved.

Denmark successfully produces some 20% of its electricity by wind farms
and plans to increase this to 40% in the future.
The Danish Wind Energy Association has confirmed (pers. com.) the need for
detailed wind forecasting if a large component of wind power is to be used.
Denmark has the advantage of being part of a large European power grid.
Australia, on the other hand, has the advantage of being much
bigger than Denmark; a wind change on the west coast of Eyre Peninsula
will take a long time to affect wind farms in Victoria or eastern NSW.

An effective and efficient wind forecasting system is obviously important
for the further development of wind power in Australia.

The graph on the right was downloaded from the above WEC site.
It shows onshore wind as being among the cheapest electricity generating
technologies; in particular, it is on a par with coal; both around
US$80/MWh.

The graph is shown in greater detail on the original document.

There have been a number of recent reports suggesting that wind power was
closing the financial gap with conventional, polluting, fossil fuel
electricity generators, but this is the most comprehensive and convincing
of the reports that I have yet seen.

Wind is Denmark's cheapest energy

"Onshore wind power is the cheapest form of new electricity generation in
Denmark, according to a recent study by the Danish Energy Agency (DEA),
the government's energy research body.
An analysis made public on Friday showed that new onshore wind plants due to
come online in 2016 will cost ... far less [per kWh] than coal, biomass and
other forms of energy production.

Considering the IEA and WEC reports mentioned above, the material in
this section below might well be out of date

Impact of Operational Wind Generation on the National Electricity
Market

By P. Wild, W.P. Bell, J. Foster; School of Economics, Uni. Qld.
(Download pdf)
Modelling showed:
"The stand-out states are South Australia and Victoria which experience
[wholesale electricity price] reductions of between 24.9 and 38.9 per
cent and 14.5 to 21.6 per cent over the interval 2010-2012."
"The impact of wind generation in the NEM was to reduce carbon
emissions in all states.
The stand-out state was South Australia with percentage reductions in carbon
emissions in the range of 3.6 to 11.0 per cent."

RenewEconomy

reported in 2013/02/07
"that new wind farms could supply electricity at
a cost of $80/MWh – compared with $143/MWh for new build coal, and
$116/MWh for new build gas-fired generation."

Renewably generated electricity has been more expensive than fossil-fuel
fired electrical generation (unless the environmental costs of burning
fossil fuels is taken into account), but this is changing.
In mid 2012 it seems that the cost of wind and solar photovoltaic is
becoming competative to new coal, gas and nuclear.
The costs of
solar PV power has fallen more
quickly than utility scale wind power.

In 2013 wholesale power prices have fallen to quite low levels,
partly due to reduced power consumption.

In February 2013
Bloomberg New Energy Finance
reported on a study that showed that some renewables had become cheaper than
fossil fuels in Australia.

"The study shows that electricity can be supplied from a new wind farm at a
cost of AUD 80/MWh (USD 83), compared to AUD 143/MWh from a new coal plant
or AUD 116/MWh from a new baseload gas plant, including the cost of
emissions under the Gillard government's carbon pricing scheme.
However even without a carbon price (the most efficient way to reduce
economy-wide emissions) wind energy is 14% cheaper than new coal and 18%
cheaper than new gas."

This figure is similar to estimates by Scientific
American, listed on my
Sustainabe
energy page.
The cost of power is very dependent on the cost of capital.

Cost of power from Hallett #1, based on SKM report

SKM (Sinclare Knight Merz) produced a report for AGL entitled 'Economic Impact
Assessment of the Hallett Wind Farms' in which they gave costs of
development, construction and operations of the first two of AGL's
Hallett wind farms.
This report was based on data up to June 2010, so the annual operating
costs are based on a very short record; the first Hallett wind farm (Brown
Hill Range, Hallett#1) was commissioned in June 2008.

The estimated costs of generation for Brown Hill Range given in the table
at the right are based on the SKM report and on my own calculation of
generation from the AEMO data, as explained in
power generation of wind farms.
Estimates for the cost of power from all the Hallett Wind Farms
are at
Generation costs at Hallett.

Wind Farm

$/MWh

Canunda

$76

Capital

$70

Challicum Hill

$76

Clements Gap

$79

Cullerin Range

$53

Hallett #1

$73

Cost of power from some other wind farms, using a relationship stated
in an EWEA report

The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) produced a report named
"The Economics of Wind Energy" in March 2009.
This gave the cost of operations and maintenance of wind farms as
13.5 Euros/MWh (=Aus$19.1/MWh on 2011/03/19) of power generated.
Using this figure, 7.5% as the cost of capital, and the published figures
for the costs of the wind farms one can calculate the costs of
electricity generated in the table on the right.

Note that this estimate for the power from Hallett #1 is very close to the
figure calculated from the SKM report for AGL above.

Wind energy cutting electricity costs

In an article in Climate Spectator, Why wind is cutting energy costs, Giles Parkinson argues that wind
power is actually forcing electricity prices down.
I will not go into the details here.

Costs of various forms of power from a US Congressional report

Levelized cost of power, 2008 dollars per megawatt-hour

Case

Wind

Pulverisedcoal

Nuclear

Natural GasCC

Base case

$67

$64

$60

$63

Carbon cost considered

$67

$80

$60

$70

CC is combined cycle

The report was by the Congressional Research Service, titled
"Wind Power in the United States: Technology, Economics, and Policy Issues",
dated 2008/06/20 and written by Jeffrey Logan and Stan Mark Kaplan.

The costs are similar to those I have calculated above; a little lower,
perhaps because they were calculated a few years earlier.
It is interesting to note that even though the authors placed a fairly low
cost on carbon pollution they still decided that wind power was the cheapest
form of those that they tabled.

The figure used for the capital cost of Wattle Point Wind
Farm was the reported sale price of $225m in 2007.

The cost of building wind farms is often stated by the organisations that
build them – the total costs of the farms I've listed in the table
on the right are given in the sections on the relevant farms.

In the table I give the capital costs per Watt, as well as
I can calculate them, for several wind farms.
Please note that the table gives the cost of building a wind farm divided
by the maximum number of Watts that wind farm is capable of generating
(cost per installed Watt) and the number of Watts it has generated on
average (cost per generated Watt).
The prices per generated Watt are from the capacity factors
that I calculated in January 2011.

In dollar terms, the cost of building wind farms has increased in the last
few years, at least partly due to substantial increases in the price of
steel.
Against this is a longer-term trend for the cost of wind turbines,
per MW, to decrease.
Factors such as these cause variations in the capital costs of wind farms
with time.
At least some of the variation in the costs per installed Watt would be
due to the time of construction; a significant factor in the cost per
generated Watt is the
capacity factor achieved by the farm.

Unlike fossil-fuelled, or nuclear, power stations, once the wind farm is
built there are, of course, no further costs for fuel; the capital cost is
by far the greatest cost of wind power.

Cost of solar PV declining

Climate Spectator
carried an article on declining prices of solar PV, 2012/05/17, (relating
to a paper published on Bloomberg New Energy Finance).
The report suggested that "fully installed system cost of $3.01/Watt for
2012 and $2.00/Watt for 2015" and that the cost of power generated by solar
PV was now below residential grid-price parity in a number of countries
including Australia.

True cost of coal

The World Health Organisation has estimated that air pollution
kills around seven million people each
year and much of this is due to burning coal.

Climate Progress published an
article that discussed the true cost
of coal when the economic, health and environmental costs are all taken into
account.
The original research was published in the Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences by Dr. Paul Epstein.
It was calculated that if the true costs of coal was considered the price
of electricity from coal fired power stations would rise by about 18 cents
per kilowatt-hour (or $180/MWh).

Many Australian wind farm operators donate money for the use
of the community around their wind farms.
The amount distributed varies greatly, with
Hepburn being by far the most generous of the wind farm operators and
Energy Infrastructure Trust (operator of Wattle Point Wind Farm and a
wholly owned subsidiary of ANZ) donating very little (based on inquiries that
I made in the Edithburg area).

In some cases the amount is based on the number of turbines, for example
$1666 per turbine per year for
Gullen Range in NSW,
in other cases it is simply a figure for the whole wind farm, for example
$50 000 per year for
Clements Gap.
At least some of the funds are linked to the CPI (and will not be eroded by
inflation in future years).

Alphabetical listing of wind farms and the associated community
funding

Notes: For the purpose of community funding Pacific Hydro
combines nearby Codrington and Yambuk as one unit, and Capes Bridgewater
and Nelson as another.

I did chase community funding figures for these...

Wind farm

Inquired

Lake Bonney, Bungendore (Infigen)

2010/09/20

No reply

Cathedral Rocks (Roaring 40s)

2010/09/21

No reply

Snowtown (Trust Power)

2010/09/20

No reply

Starfish Hill, Toora, Windy Hill (Transfield)

2010/09/21

No reply

Wattle Point (Energy Infrastructure Trust – ANZ)

2010/09/21

No reply

Gunning (Acciona)

2010/09/21

No reply

It is probable that all of the above companies provide
very little community funding.

Mount Millar (Meridian)

Replied, see text.

More information on the funding relating to specific farms can be
read on my state pages.
The community funding section is generally near the bottom of the wind
farm information.

The table on the left lists all those wind farms for which I've been able to
find data on community funding.
One would suppose that the others probably provide less community funding
(otherwise the information would be easy to come by).

It seems that it is not uncommon from wind farm companies to provide no more
than around $500 per turbine per year in community funding; yet they are
paying farmers $7000 to $14 000 per turbine per year for hosting the
turbines.
Perhaps some more generosity would increase public acceptance of turbines?
Or perhaps the companies should place more resources into getting some
local ownership
into their wind farms as a way of increasing support?

Individual landowners
negotiate with wind farmers for acceptable lease
arrangements; should communities have some right to negotiate for
community contributions from the wind farmers?
They do not have at present.

Note that Hepburn Wind (by far the most generous company in terms of the
donation per turbine; see table on the left) is a
community owned wind power company and has two turbines.

Verve Energy, WA

Verve own all the major WA wind farms.
Craig Carter, Senior Electrical Engineer for Verve, gave me the following:
"We don't publicise these [community funding]
figures as each project is assessed on a project
specific basis, with benefits to the community spread across a variety of
areas including tourist infrastructure, funding towards local projects,
local employment, etc."
It is a pity that Verve do not publish their figures; are they not proud
of them?

Meridian

Meridian is a NZ-based company that owns the Mount Millar Wind Farm in SA.
They provide community funding in relation to their NZ hydro and
wind operations (Te Apiti, Waitaki, Manapouri Te Anau, White Hill, and
West Wind), but apparently none for the community around Mount Millar.
To get it "from the horse's mouth", go to
Meridian,
"About us" and "Community funding".

Transfield

Transfield own several wind farms.
If they do not provide any community funding, as seems likely, it is a great
loss to the communities that host Transfield's wind farms.

Compulsory funding?

Terry Teoh of Pacific Hydro (one of the most generous companies) made
the following comment on 2010/09/14.

"There has been discussion recently in Victoria and NSW by the bureaucrats
to make the sustainable community fund compulsory.
We are quite concerned about this.
The wind industry came to this voluntarily as a way to establish our
ethical compass.
By making it compulsory, the bureaucrats would destroy the purpose and
value of the fund.
If Council is used as the fund administrator, it would become a Council
budget line, with the State government then reducing their support to
Council to compensate.
So making the community fund would have the perverse effect of reducing
overall funding into the community."

(I am cynical enough to believe that councils and state governments might
use the voluntary payments from wind farmers as an excuse to reduce funding
too!)
Some companies are generous, others apparently give very little.
Is this fair?
Perhaps some level of compulsory funding would be better?
Or perhaps making these figures more widely known will place pressure on
those companies that are lagging to lift their game?

Denmark and Germany have successfully developed community ownership of wind
farms.
A part of an article published in Wind Power Works about community-owned
wind farms in Germany:

40% of local residents have invested in the Galmsbüll "Citizens'
Wind Farm"

Community investment has helped Germany to become the most successful
nation for wind power in Europe.
At Marienkoog in the North Friesland region, dozens of local people have
taken a share in their local wind farm and watched the turbines being
constructed for the benefit of the neighbourhood.

When the older wind turbines at Marienkoog were replaced by fewer more
powerful models, the local community was offered a third of the shares in
the 'repowering' project.
Altogether, in the Galmsbüll Bürgerwindpark (Citizens' wind farm),
of which Marienkoog is part, a total of 240 residents invested 5 million
euros.
This represented 40% of the district's adult population.

One result has been general acceptance of the new taller wind turbines in
the landscape of this mainly farming region close to the North Sea coast.
The local council also receives income from the business tax paid by the
wind farm.

A lot more could be done to give Australians the chance to invest in wind
farm construction, especially in nearby wind farms, in Australia.
Some degree of local ownership could increase acceptance of the wind farms.

When wind farmers build a wind farm on privately owned land (most are on
privately owned land) they have to come to an agreement with the land
owner.
A very few land owners don't want wind turbines at all, but most see the
turbines as causing little harm to their farming and the payments from
the wind farmers as very significant additions to their farm incomes.

Land lease payments in the USA

A report by the Congressional Research Service, titled
"Wind Power in the United States: Technology, Economics, and Policy Issues",
dated 2008/06/20 and written by Jeffrey Logan and Stan Mark Kaplan gave
the following: "Farmers and ranchers typically receive from project
developers $2,000-5,000 per year for each turbine on their land".
(Many US wind turbines are smaller than those in Australia, because they
were built earlier.)

There may be a once-off payment for access, and there usually is an
annual payment per turbine.
Some years ago I heard that a typical payment for one turbine was $4000 per
year.
More recently I had a confirmed figure of $7000 per turbine per year for
one wind farm (the company didn't want it to be commonly known, most of these
deals are confidential).
I have recently (July 2009) heard, second hand, unconfirmed, that some
wind farmers are paying $12 000 to $14 000 (for wind farm
agreements around 2013 these figures would, I believe, be typical).
Sometimes the payments are fixed as a proportion of the gross income from
the sale of the electricity generated by the turbines.

Farmers should, for their own protection, make sure that the agreement that
they sign does not leave them liable for decommissioning the turbines at the
end of their useful life.
Depending on how the decommissioning is done, it could be very expensive,
especially if nearby
native vegetation has to be protected in the decommissioning process.

The 'states' pages cover wind farms within the Australian states.
As of October 2009 there are no wind farms in the Northern Territory nor in
the Australian Capital Territory (so far as I know).
There is a wind farm in the Australian Antarctic Territory and on
Cocos Island.

There are two 300 kW wind turbines at Mawson.
The Australian Antarctic Division Net site I had is no longer valid.
Quoting from the AAD Net page:

Two 300 kW wind turbines were installed at Mawson in 2003 and now make a
significant contribution to the station's power requirements.

The Mawson wind turbine system ranks among the world's most innovative, and
is capable of providing 600 kW of renewable power.
Australia is the first country to obtain a significant electricity supply for
its Antarctic stations fuelled by the most powerful winds on the planet.

Studies in the early 1990s revealed that the constant
katabatic winds blowing
from the inland of the continent make Mawson ideally situated to generate the
bulk of its energy requirements with wind turbines.

The AAD worked closely with a German turbine manufacturer (Enercon) and an
Australian company (Powercorp Pty Ltd) to install the turbines and the
associated computerised powerhouse control system in early 2003.

Some statistics on the wind farm were on the AAD Mawson Net site, but
this is no longer available.

I thank Lee Sice for alerting me to the AAD net page on the Mawson wind farm.

Much of the information on these pages has been gleaned from the Internet.
I have visited all the South Australian and Victorian wind farms (as of
mid 2008); some of what is on these pages comes from those visits.
Important other information has come from people
who have been kind enough to respond to my inquiries,
and several people have volunteered very welcome information.

These acknowledgements are arranged in alphabetical order.
I am indebted to a number of others who have provided information but have
requested that their names not be mentioned (a pity, because I like to
ascribe information sources to allow readers to judge credibility).
My apologies to any informants who have helped but I have missed
acknowledging.

Ahern, Rodney – TrustPower

Barber, Greg – Greens MP in Victoria

Barnard, Mike – Mike writes on wind power; he has lived in
Canada, Brazil and Singapore

Photo credits

I have tried to use photos that have some artistic merit; there are a
great many on the Internet that do not.
Several photos have come from the Net, several others were offered to
me by a friend, the others are mine.

Here is something that has, so far as I know, never been done in Australia;
a wind turbine used as an art form; or you could say, as a canvas on which
to mount a work of art.

Klaus Rockenbauer placed a copy of the photo on the right on Flickr.
It is of an Enercon turbine in Munich, Germany.
Klaus said:

"On the blades of this wind turbine were placed about 9000 LED's.
They draw motives in the night sky every day for about 7 hours.
This art-object should be a sign to the energy problem worldwide and also is
the biggest Christmas-star of the world."

The Osram Net site had a page on the turbine:

"Right on time for the first Advent Sunday it is obvious to all: But still
it moves!
Siemens – together with multimedia artist Michael Pendry – has
lighted up the world's biggest revolving Christmas star.
The lighting installation can be seen throughout December [2009] at the
northern gateway to Munich – beginning at dusk every evening."

The entire installation uses only as much electricity as a hair dryer or
a water kettle, yet in good weather it can be seen for 30 kilometres.

A similar thing could be done in Australia.
It could have the potential to make turbines more of an attraction than
they are at present.

Towers

Rotation

Some turbines rotate at variable rates, for example Vestas; others rotate
at a constant rate, for example Acciona at
Gunning Wind Farm.
Some turbines within older US wind farms rotate in opposite directions, all
turbines in any particular Australian wind farm rotate in the same direction.

Downwind, upwind

Some older turbines have the blades on the downwind side of the tower;
this has been found to lead to more noise due to the blades passing through
the turbulent air from the tower.
All Australian industrial-scale wind turbines have the blades upwind
from the tower so that they can rotate in 'clean' air.

Rotating blades or blade-tips

In most Australian turbines the blade can be rotated as a whole (twisted
about its long axis) to make it interact with the wind at the optimal
angle, or to stop the turbine for whatever purpose.
Some turbines, such as the Neg Micon ones at
Starfish Hill Wind Farm
have blade tips that can be rotated independently of the bulk of the blade.

Gear-box or not

Most electrical generators have to rotate at a much higher speed than
the rotation rate of a wind turbine, so most wind turbines have a gear-box
to increase the rotation rate something like ninety-fold compared to the
turbine rotor.
The Enercon turbines at
Mount Millar Wind Farm have
annular generators that do
not require fast rotation and therefore have no gear-box.
I don't know of any other turbines in Australia having annular generators
than those at Mount Millar.

Wind speeds

Most Australian turbines can generate power from a wind that is at least
four metres per second.
Most turbines reach their rated power at about 14m/s, see
Efficiency of
wind turbines.
Most turbines shut down, to protect themselves from damage, at about
25 m/s.
The Vestas turbines at
Collgar Wind Farm, near
Merridin in WA, are rated at 1.86 MW, while the same model at
Waterloo Wind Farm is rated
at 3 MW.
This is because the winds at Merridin are generally lighter than those at
Waterloo.

Construction

Footings

If a turbine is built on bed-rock it can make use of 'rock anchors' to
secure a relatively small concrete footing (about 220 tonnes) to the
underlying bed-rock.
If there is no shallow bed-rock, or the bed-rock is shattered, then
heavier footings (about 800 tonnes), that are capable of holding the
turbine in place without any attachment to underlying materials, must
be used.

Order of assembly

Suzlon turbines are generally built by first placing the first two
sections of the tower, followed by the next two tower sections, then
the nacelle is lifted.
The blades are attached to the hub on the ground and the final big
lift raises the entire rotor.
Apparently Acciona turbines generally have the hub and blades lifted
and attached individually.

Operating or under construction:

Credit:
Wind-Works.org and Paul Gipe
German solar PV is similar, 39% owned by individuals, 21% by farmers.
It is very different in Australia, where big companies own most of the
power generation, renewables and others.
It doesn't have to be.

Proposed:

A cooperative called
CENREC (Central NSW Renewable
Energy Co-operative Ltd) has been set up to raise funds and purchase a
turbine at Infigen's proposed
Flyers Creek Wind Farm;

A group calling itself Central Coast Community Energy Association
Incorporated (CCCE) is proposing a
community owned renewable energy
development from sun and wind near Woy Woy, just north of Sydney in NSW;

WindLab have approval for a small wind farm at
Coonooer Bridge in
Victoria that will have a hybrid corporate/community ownership structure.

Community owned wind farm, or not?

When is a wind farm community owned?
One would think that a community owned wind farm would be owned by the
local community.
One might think that anyone within the local community might have
the right to partake in investment in the project.

Anyone can buy shares in
Hepburn Wind Farm, there is
no need for them to be local people.
I am informed that there are only 13 share holders in
Mount Barker Wind Farm,
that one person has a 51% controlling interest and that it is 70% owned
by the Great Southern Community.

My impression was that the report (June 2011) from the inquiry was
reasonable and balanced.
I will not try to summarise the report here, it can be downloaded from
the Parliament net site.

However, I did notice some errors:

Introduction Section 1.7. Installed capacities seems to have
been confused with actual generation in the discussion of SA.

Noise and health Section 2.11 seismic waves have been confused with
infrasound.
See Seismic waves.

Noise and health Section 2.22 contains a quote from a person
"who has 30 wind turbines within two kilometres of his home".
It seems to me that the turbines at Waubra are too scattered for there to
be 30 within 2km of any point.
There would be 30 turbines within a 2km radius at Wattle Point, but no houses
at any such point!
I cannot think of any wind farm in Australia where this situation would be
possible.

Property values Section 4.8; the quote is meaningless.
The "last offer we received" could be the lowest offer received.
How many offers were received?
What was their range?

Property values Section 4.10; "it had been reported that properties
had been devalued by 30 percent".
(It has been reported, by ABC reporter Bronwyn Herbert, that most of
Australia's wind farms are in Victoria!
At that time more than 50% of wind power was in SA.)
Many fallacies are reported; this was hearsay without any value.

In November 2011 Pacific Hydro surveyed
attitudes to wind energy in ten communities across Victoria, NSW and SA where
wind farms were operating or proposed.
The main results were:

Nationally – 83% support, 14% opposed, 3% undecided;

NSW – 77% support;

SA – 90% support;

Vic. – 84% support;

The research was done by Qdos, a branch of
Interconsult.
Pacific Hydro informed me that...

"The ... survey polled 1000 residents across 10 electorates in
NSW, SA and Victoria that are in wind farming regions.
The Victorian five electorates were also polled (by QDos) in 2010 as part of
a similar sized survey (ten electorates in wind farming regions) which
yielded very consistent results on wind farm attitudes as we saw from this
year's survey.

Results at a macro-level (total survey results) are consistent with the
results in each area.
While not [every] electorate is statistically significant, the results are
consistent across the regions and yield a reliable total result (to within a
fairly small margin of error)."

The survey quized one hundred people in each of ten communities: Ripon,
Ballarat West and South West Coast (all Victoria), Polworth, Macedon,
Goulburn, Yass and Crookwell (all NSW) and Clare and Barossa Valley in SA.

Pacific Hydro were not willing to release the methodology used in the survey.
Thus there is a question about the survey accuracy.

Clean Energy Council, December 2011

I have become aware that another survey of wind power acceptance was
carried out in late December for the Clean Energy Council, and while
the results have not yet (2012/01/26) been officially released, the results
showed in the vicinity of a 75% acceptance of wind farms.
This survey was carried out by Market Metrics.

A Community Survey,
March 2011, involving 358 people living near the existing
Waterloo, and proposed
Stony Gap
and Robertstown wind farms.
The survey indicated that 66% of respondents were concerned about climate
change, 77% supported wind farms, 69% supported nearby wind farms, and
a majority saw wind farms as positives for: appearance, tourism,
local business, short term jobs, local economy and landholder income.

Bungendore, and others

Infigen commissioned QDos Research to conduct a survey into the perceptions
of Bungendore Wind Farm (in NSW) held by the local people.
Infigen stated that the survey was motivated by a desire to show the facts
about public support
for the wind farm following "much debate surrounding public opinion on wind
farms in Australia".
The results were released in May 2012.

Distance from turbines

It is probable that most of the respondents to this survey would have
been people who lived in Bungendore and Tarago.
Bungendore is 11km from the nearest of the Bungendore turbines;
Tarago is 8km from the nearest Woodlawn turbine.

Infigen calculated the approximate population of the area surveyed –
Bungendore and Tarago – to be 3300.
Of these 200 householders and 34 businesses were interviewed by telephone.

The survey report is available from
Infigen's Net site.
A small selection of the responses to the survey are:

Do you think generating electricity from wind farm benifits the
environment?

Benefits, 75%; does not benefit, 10%

Good or bad for the local community?

13 times as many people said it was good rather than bad for the community.

The NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure conducted surveys of
people who live within four kilometres of the three above wind farms and
reported on these surveys on 2012/05/18.
The results are given in a
pdf document.

Why the apparently differing results between the QDos and DPI surveys?

First; I am not a statistician, and I did not spend a lot of time
examining the methodology and results from the surveys.

Second; obviously the questions are not the same.

Third; the QDos survey was by telephone, the DPI survey apparently was
written.

It seems that the more positive results from the QDos survey could be due to
the respondents predominantly living further away from the wind farm than
those in the DPI survey.

The DPI survey results did not provide any corelation between the degree of
annoyance and the distance from the turbines or between the respondent's
attitude to turbines and their level of annoyance.
The DPI survey did not ask for people's attitudes to wind turbines generally,
this too could have been interesting because there is evidence of links
between
negativity and symptom reporting.

There is not space here for many of the results from the DPI surveys, so I
have listed two of what I thought the more important results:

I'm sure there are a huge number of aspects to the relationship between
local government and wind farms; I'm only going to write of one at this
time.

Council income and wind farms

Wind farms are very expensive developments.
They have very high capital values.
It is difficult to find out how much income councils get from wind farm
developments.

In one of Acciona's newsletters (#18) for the
Waubra Wind Farm it was stated
that "Almost $1 million has been paid to Pyrenees Shire Council and City of
Ballarat through rates".

In the minutes for the Waterloo/Stony Gap wind farm Community Liason
Committee meeting minutes for August 2012 it was stated that about
$50 000 was paid as planning fees for the six-turbine Waterloo stage
2 proposal; the corresponding figure for the 37-turbine
Waterloo Wind Farm's
planning fees were $196 000.

Most, but not all, of the active opposition to wind power in Australia is
based on misinformation, fallacies and hidden agendas.
(The motivations
of supporters and objectors are discussed elsewhere on this page.)

There are several main groups or classes of opposition:

The fossil-fuel industry – who do not want to loose market share
to renewables and who have a strong influence over both the big political
parties, but in particular, the Liberal Party;

The Labor Party, while not being stridently opposed to renewable energy,
like the Liberal Party, is half-hearted in its support of renewables.
The Gillard Labor Government subsidises the fossil fuel industry with
billions of dollars each year;

Those who
(mistakenly) believe that wind farms
are useless,
are economically unjustified or cause more environmental harm than good;

Those who support wind power in general but oppose a particular wind
farm for NIMBY reasons,
for envy of neighbours who will profit while the objector misses out,
for feelings of
'invasion of place' or similar
reasons.

Those who believe that nuclear power is the only non-fossil fuel option
(in fact the two are not mutually exclusive);

Those who simply don't like wind turbines and wind farms and don't look
beyond their personal wants;

Perhaps some who feel we should be greatly reducing our energy consumption
rather than ever increasing our energy generation.

Many of the people in these groups are willing to
lie
in an effort to achieve their aim of stopping wind farm development.

There is a very strong, organised and entrenched opposition to wind power
in Australia.
While the fossil fuel industry does not readily admit to opposing renewable
energy it is very hard to immagine where else this lobbying and misinformation
campaign could be coming from.
Why should the
Liberal Party be opposed to renewable energy
development in
Australia if they are not being pushed by the mining and fossil fuels
industries?
They must know that renewables are very
popular among the Australian people,
so they wouldn't be doing it for reason of chasing votes.

Opposition to renewable energy in the
Murdoch media seems particularly
strong; I wonder if this is due to links with the fossil fuel or mining
industry.

Motivation and attitude

Motivation has a lot in common with
attitude and our attitude to wind
turbines can have important consequences to ourselves should we live near
a wind farm.

Willingness to lie

It can be surprising how many people are willing to lie as a means of
supporting their opposition to wind farms;
see Wind Power Lies.

Age: an observation

Most wind power opponents seem to be over 50.
(I should add that I am well over 60.)

In most other sections on the Wind Power pages I have tried to concentrate
on the facts as I have learned of them.
In this section I am making personal observations and speculations.

What motivates those who support and those who object to wind farms?
Are the motivations selfish or altruistic?
Are the supporters and objectors concerned mainly with local matters or with
global matters?
(I should say here that I do not necessarily condemn those who object for
selfish reasons; we all have the right to look after ourselves; if we don't
in many cases no-one else will.)
Of course
NIMBYism is relevant here.

Many supporters, including
spokesmen
for the wind farming companies, talk
about the advantages that will accrue to the local area.
Companies do not have motivations; it is only people who have motivations.
The spokesmen for the wind farm companies, I suspect, in most cases are
motivated by the need to convince the local people of the desirability of
the wind farm.

Then there is the motivation of the bosses of the corporations involved.
Several, perhaps most, of the companies that are operating or proposing
wind farms also have heavy investment in fossil fuels: coal, gas, coal-seam
gas.
One would have to wonder how keen these people are to see wind power succeed.

Motivations of supporters and objectors

Supporters

Objectors

Those who own the land on which the turbines are to be built will often,
quite understandably, be wanting the significant additional income they see
they will be getting if the wind farm is built.
So many of these will be motivated by self-interest.

Many of the supporters, myself included, are motivated by a
belief that
climate change and
ocean acidification
are huge looming disasters and that renewable
energy must be adopted to reduce the production of greenhouse gasses.
So the motivation of this group is from a concern for the good of the
biosphere and is altruistic.

Presumably those who do not live anywhere near wind farms, are not involved
in the industry and support wind
farms do so because they believe the world must change from fossil fuels
to sustainable energy for environmental reasons; again, an altruistic
motivation.
I should comment here that this group have little to loose from the building
of wind farms elsewhere than near them.

Wind farm objectors are of
several distinct types.
Those who object to having wind farms built near them are acting on
selfish motives.
There are the objectors who believe that the good of the local area,
or the local people,
needs to take a higher priority than the good of the earth as a whole.

Some oppose a nearby wind farm because of envy.
They see that their neighbours are going to do very well financially, while
they themselves seem to be missing out.

Many objectors will talk about bird and bat kills and claim that wind
turbines are a waste of money; but one gets the impression that these
are not their motivations.
These are arguments that they have adopted because the objectors believe
they are arguments that will support their cases.
It is remarkable how many people become environmentalists when it suits
their selfish ends to do so.

Many of the most vociferous objectors to renewable energy are motivated
by the desire to support the fossil fuel industry, because their
financial interests are in that industry.
These are motivated by selfish aims and are unethical.
These people will, of course, try to hide their true motivations, because
they are usually quite aware of the immorality of their stance.

The Liberals, including
Rowan Ramsey, must be motivated by a desire to support the mining
and fossil fuel industries – who, in turn, support them with campaign
donations.

In the case of
Dr Sarah Laurie, who is an outspoken wind farm objector, my
impression is that while her concern was triggered by a proposed local
wind farm, her main motivation is that she (wrongly) believes that wind
turbines are making people ill.

The 'supporters' column is much narrower than the
'objectors' column.
Similarly there are many more vocal objectors than vocal supporters.
Unfortuneatly it seems much more to be in human nature to complain about
something that you see as to your personal disadvantage than to support
something that you see as being to the advantage of all.

Interestingly, I have been told of one farmer who told his neighbour,
"If I get turbines on my place I am for them, otherwise I'm opposed".

This organisation is not, as its name implies and as it claims, concerned
to protect the Australian landscape.
It is concerned only with opposing wind power.
To see that this is true you need only compare their
Resources
page – which is exclusively about wind farms – with their
'About' page, that claims many environmental interests.

Ted Baillieu was Premier of Victoria for a period up to March 2013
when he was replaced by Dr Denis Napthine.
Baillieu passed
laws that made it virtually impossible
for anyone to obtain
planning permission to build a wind turbine in that state.
Lawyer Randall Bell is president of the Australian Landscape Guardians.
Bell was reported by Aaron Langmaid in the Herald Sun as saying
"Mr Baillieu's policy was the best in the world," and
"If Dr Napthine reneges on that policy, I'll break his arms."
(More at Some Air by Ketan Joshi.)

The ALG is an
'astroturfing' organisation, just as is the
Institute of Public
Affairs (IPA, a Liberal Party think tank) and the
Australian Environment Foundation (AEF), both of which are linked to the ALG.
The AEF is a classic astroturfer, having
apparently chosen its name to sound very similar to the genuine environmental
body, the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Organisations funded by the multinational oil corporation Exxon

ExxonSecrets (a Greenpeace project) lists organisations funded by Exxon.
The Institute of Public Affairs
set up the Australian Environment Foundation which went
on to set up the Australian Climate Science Coalition
List: http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/listorganizations.php
IPA: http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=150
ACSC: http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=163

The IPA has been called the Institute of Poppycock and Agitprop (agitprop
– agitation and propaganda).
Quite apt.

ABC TV's Media Watch did a segment on the IPA and AEF on 2012/03/19, linking
them to another astroturfer, the so-called
Australian Climate Science
Coalition, which is actually an anti-climate science group.
Significantly, Ian Plimer is a member of the 'Scientific Advisory
Panel' of the ACSC.
(Mr Plimer used to be Professor of Mining Geology at Adelaide University,
where, I believe, he became something of an embarrasment due to his
unscientific stance on climate change.
He recently left the University to devote himself more fully to his
considerable mining interests.)

To find out more about the ALG I suggest that you read
Independent Australia's The ugly landscape
of the Guardians.
It is an excellent exposé of the ALG by Sandi Keane and goes into the
links between the Waubra Foundation, the Australian Landscape
Guardians, the Institute of Public Affairs, the fossil fuel industry and
others.

Using these pages: some hints

Most of the pages of 'Wind in the Bush' are set out like reference books.
There is a contents list at the top of each page
and at least one index at the bottom of almost
all pages.
Use these to find the subject you want, or use CTRL F to find words or
phrases that interest you.
There is also a search box near the top of this page.
All the main pages of 'Wind in the Bush' are listed at the top left of this
page and on each of the states' pages.

The greater good?

It could be claimed that I am willing to lie in support of wind power, and
justify that to myself by the belief that the lying is a small wrong that is
more than made up for by 'the greater good' of delaying climate change.
Not so.
Apart from the ethical objection to lying, lies are usually detected in time
and when that happens the
liar is discredited.
Lying would, in the long run, be counterproductive.

My motivation in writing these
pages, in a word, is
ethics.
Everyone in the world, especially those who live in the countries that
produce more than their fair share of the greenhouse gasses, has an ethical
responsibility to try to reduce the rate of
greenhouse
gas production.

I have followed climate change science for thirty years or more; I have been
reading and subscribing to Scientific American for about 35 years.
Climate change and ocean acidification, both caused largely by the greenhouse
gasses that humanity is putting into the atmosphere, will be disasters of a
magnitude that few people even grasp.
They will result in thousands or, more likely, millions of species becoming
extinct; extensive changes to almost all of the world's environments;
and the displacement and possibly the deaths of billions of people.

The development of renewable energy will slow the impact of climate change
and ocean acidification.
Wind power (followed increasingly closely by solar PV) happens to be the most
market-ready form of renewable energy
available to us in the early part of the 21st century.

I have no desire to see anyone harmed, but if we can significantly slow the
onset of climate change at the cost of some thousands or tens of
thousands of people world-wide being slightly inconvenienced by hearing and
seeing wind turbines, I see that as a price well worth paying.

So, I want renewable energy to be developed as quickly as possible for the
good of the planet and the best way in which that can be achieved is for
people to be helped to understand the
facts of wind power, rather than hearing and reading only the
lies and delusions that are spread by those who are opposed to wind turbines.

In response to some of the attacks that objectors make on my Net pages it
seems that I need to say that I am not under any delusions that the big
power companies such as Energy Australia are generally admirable or
'good guys'; I fully realise that they are mainly building wind farms in
order to make a profit.
Energy Australia, for example, not only builds and owns wind farms, but also
highly polluting coal-fired power stations.
These pages are an attempt to support renewable energy, not to support the
big corporations that are building wind farms.

If you find an error (of fact or omission) on a sustainable energy or any
other page you will be doing me a favour
by pointing it out so that I can correct it; my email address is
daveclarkecb@yahoo.com and is also near the
top of each page.
Obviously, since my primary aim is ethical, misrepresentation of the facts
cannot be acceptable to me.

My aim is that everything on these pages that is not plainly an opinion
should be true and also verifiable.
I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it.

All photos on these pages are mine unless otherwise indicated.
The background photo for the wind farm pages, and the title photo on this
page, are of Wattle Point Wind Farm, Yorke Peninsula, SA.
The title photo on the Wind Victoria page is of the Toora Wind Farm,
that of the Wind SA page is of the Brown Hill Range Wind Farm and
that of the Wind WA page is of the Albany Wind Farm.

I considered working on the appropriate Wikipedia pages rather than writing
these sustainable energy pages, but decided to 'do my own thing' for the
following reasons:

Political comment seems inappropriate in Wikipedia pages on sustainable
energy, but I believe criticism of governments is important if Australia
is ever to substantially replace its fossil-fuel-based electrical
generating systems with sustainable energy systems.

Any work that I do on a Wikipedia page can be altered or deleted by
somebody else.

I have full control over the format of these pages.

I can request and receive feedback from readers.

I can work on the pages without being connected to the Net.

I have an ego; having put many hundreds of hours of work into these
pages, I want my name on them.

There is a lot of fiction out there
and it cannot be overcome unless people can also find the facts.

Standing of wind power in Australia

Wind is a major source of
sustainable energy, and the fastest growing (although solar PV is giving
it a nudge around 2011, 2012); people should be able
to find the relevant information.

Government support

Australia has an ethical responsibility to
reduce its massive greenhouse gas production rate; if companies and citizens
do not behave ethically then government must take the responsible
for forcing ethical practice on them.

I (David Clarke, the author of these pages) am independent of any company,
lobby group, or government; however as of February 2012 I did have the following
affiliations:

Moderator, Yes to Renewables – Australia;

Member, Community Liaison Group for Waterloo and Stony Gap wind farms;

Life member Trees For Life, South Australia;

I have financially supported the Australian Greens and was for many years
a member of the Australian Democrats;

I have given donations to, and continue to support, various environmental
conservation groups as well as general charities;

I am a supporter of 'Death with dignity';

I have never received payment for services from any wind power organisation;
I have, however, sold rights to photographs to a number of organistations,
including wind farmers.
I have accepted free registration for a wind power conference (Adelaide 2013).

The index on the left is generated by a computer search for a class of
hypertext references to 'wind farm'; references to 'wind farms' and
'wind farm ' (note the final space character) are excluded from this index
and are listed in the
Australia Master Index.

The number of entries does not give an indication of the number of
(proposed and operating) wind farms in Australia because several farms
have two names, both of which are listed in the index.